I was sick this past week. I’m feeling much better now, but it was a bit of a rough week, which is a shame because I was hoping for it to be a really fun week.
There was an NPR bit about a musical about political resistance in Egypt? And for whatever reason I thought it’d be cool if someone did a story set in modern Egypt with Egyptian gods and the political situation in Egypt? I just thought it’d be cool. I don’t know enough on Egypt to even consider it though.
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James Lovegrove’s Pantheon Series
Have you seen these books? They’re from a series of military science-fiction books all connected to mythology, with titles Age of _____. They confused the heck out of me when I first stumbled upon them, because I assumed that they were all in the same continuity, which they’re not. Age of Zeus is not the sequel to Age of Ra and Age of Odin is a different story entirely from both of those. Reading the backs of the books I had trouble figuring out how the world got from being taken over by the Egyptian gods to being taken over by the Olympians to being defended by the Aesir.
Eventually sitting in the Barnes and Noble I decided to pick one of them up. First I read was Age of Odin, in which a disillusioned British soldier gets killed and then picked for Valhalla as Ragnarok steadily approaches. It was… alright, I suppose? There were bits that felt kind of stupid. For starters, when the protagonist meets Freya he’s immediately attracted to her, and despite not really seeming particularly special she ends up falling for him. For Reasons? There’s also this subplot about there being a traitor, and the protagonist thinks it’s this one guy and it’s clearly not? Human characters seem to hew close to national stereotypes. Also the villain is Sarah Palin? I mean it’s Loki disguised as the US President that is an obvious stand-in for Sarah Palin, which is an amusing joke, but a bit silly for an actual Plot that we’re meant to take seriously.
Still, even if I thought the book was okay at best, what stuck out to me was the ending. For all its mediocre-ness, the ending was kind of an explosion of Awesome, in which Heimdall headshots Loki with a sniper rifle. And that is one of the best images of Norse mythology I have ever had the pleasure of reading in my life.
So I decided to pick up Age of Ra afterward. The Plot of this one was that the Egyptian pantheon had taken over the world, defeating and destroying all other pantheons, and afterward the major gods divvied up the continents between themselves. But because Set doesn’t get along with any of the other gods, the world’s constantly embroiled in a world war between the continents controlled by Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis and Horus’s sons against Set and his wife Nephtys’s lands. The protagonist finds himself joining a group that’s dedicated to overthrowing the rule of the gods, but the leader of that group, a masked man who calls himself the Lightbringer, has his own agenda that he’s not sharing.
Again, not a brilliant novel, but it did have its high points. While the twist about which god was behind everything at the end was pretty obvious (Set, the villainous god of deception, was responsible the entire time?? WHAT?!?), I don’t think I’ve run against that many stories about Egyptian mythology, and not ones that deal with their family dynamics. There are regular interludes that don't feature the human characters at all--just Ra desperately going from one god to another, trying to convince them not to try to kill each other. And I liked that characterization, especially because at the end he fails and just says “Screw it!” and he retires as king.
But like I said the story of the human characters is still kind of dumb. Aside from the twist that the Lightbringer is actually the puppet of one of the gods (this is not a twist if you know what Lightbringer is in Latin, guys), it also has the whole ‘Here is a beautiful, unattainable woman who for Reasons falls in love with the protagonist’ thing that Lovegrove likes. So it wasn’t until about four years later that I picked up another one of these books, and that was Age of Zeus.
It wasn’t that good. In part because it’s basically the same as Age of Ra: the Greek gods have taken over the world. The twist here is (spoilers) that the Greek gods aren’t actually gods, they’re genetically-enhanced humans with superpowers because this one guy was a dick and made himself Zeus. Which made me feel slightly better about the Plot, considering it’s about killing the Olympians, and I have weird feelings about god-killing plots. And of course, our protagonist is a woman this time around.
Parts of it felt like the author was trying too hard to sound adult and extreme. The other two books in the series had this too, but Age of Zeus had too many and it just felt gross. It wasn’t particularly fun to read that the guy who was chosen to become Hades was a necrophiliac before he got his god powers. That’ just… gross. Especially considering it adds next to nothing to the story other than making him a creep, which we already knew.
There’s also the question of just why the gods were able to beat back people at all. They had godlike powers, to be sure, but they can be killed with weapons, it’s just very difficult. And yet they apparently destroyed cities and ravaged armies. And yet you’re telling me that no one in the entire world fought against them and they never caused a dent in them? With our bullets and bombs and missiles? Really? And I get that Lovegrove is British, but am I meant to believe that the UK is the first country to really stand up to this threat?
It basically had many of the problems the other two had, but they were magnified. And I decided that even if I liked one of the books and the ending of another, I didn’t really have much reason to keep on reading these. Maybe the rest of the books clean up the issues that the author had with the first three, or maybe he does something interesting with the mythology like he does in Age of Ra. But given that I’ve read three of these books, and only genuinely liked one of them, and only liked the ending of another, I can’t really say that I have much motivation to pick up more.
And that’s a shame because I love mythology! There’s something interesting to be done with military science-fiction and mythology being mixed together; or perhaps just mythology and science fiction mashed up. But it could be done better than this, and more often than not I’m not satisfied with how the books turned out.
You can probably skip these.
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